


together with the end

by screechfox



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Apocalypse but a different one, Domestic, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hopeful Ending, The Extinction, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-18 16:45:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21279962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screechfox/pseuds/screechfox
Summary: Humanity dies on a rainy Tuesday night. Georgie Barker wakes up on her sofa knowing that everything is ending.(Not canon compliant from MAG157 onwards.)
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Jonathan Sims, The Admiral & Georgie Barker, The Admiral & Jonathan Sims
Comments: 12
Kudos: 167





	together with the end

**Author's Note:**

> so i started this back in _June_ during my A Levels, abandoned it for some reason, and picked it up again after MAG157. except canon has now stomped over my apocalypse with its own, so i figured i'd polish up what i had and post it
> 
> original draft title: "the archivist and georgie barker: apocalypse domesticity"

Humanity dies on a rainy Tuesday night. It dies screaming, an agonised harmony that rises to a crescendo— and then vanishes, all at once. Diseased smoke coils in the air with an acrid tang, rising from warped and mangled bodies that line the lifeless streets and buildings of London.

Georgie Barker wakes up on her sofa knowing that everything is ending. It trickles down her neck like cold water. She clutches the Admiral and listening to the gentle rhythm of his sleeping breaths. Fear isn’t the word for what she’s feeling; it’s more like the anticipation of total grief. Georgie runs her fingers through the Admiral’s fur, and resolves not to disturb him by moving. 

“Good boy,” she murmurs, just for the normality of her own voice.

The Admiral wakes up a few minutes later, purring and pressing his head against her chin. Then he darts out from underneath the blanket, deciding that it’s time to be fed now, please.

Georgie obliges, well aware that she’s using the familiar routine to distract herself. She finds herself glancing at her bedroom door, knowing exactly whose body will be lying dead below the covers. She doesn’t want to see Melanie like that. It’s been so long since Georgie cried —  _ Jon staring at her in her dreams while she sleeps by his bedside on that first uncertain night of his death-coma _ — but that might just do it.

She gets as far as the door handle, and then rushes back to the warm comfort of the blankets on the sofa. When she takes a deep-breath and tries again, she finds herself darting into the bathroom instead, staring at her own bloodless face and lack of breath.

_ Oh, _ she thinks, with a distant relief.  _ I’ve been dead all along. _

Very calmly, she does not open her bedroom door. Instead, she grabs a plastic bag and fills it with clothes from the washing machine, then retrieves the cat carrier from the top shelf in the kitchen. The Admiral hisses at her, but reluctantly wanders inside after she places a treat in the back. There are blankets to curl up on, and he falls asleep quickly.

Georgie stares at the closed bedroom door.

There’s no point looking, she tells herself. It’ll only hurt her.

Georgie doesn’t realise where she’s going until she’s halfway there, clothes in one hand and cat in another. She walks through lifeless streets filled with the stink of burnt, rotting carcasses, and finds herself heading inexorably towards the Thames. Towards the Institute. Towards Jon, no matter how much she wished she’d never have to see him again.

(She knows Jon is alive as surely as she knows that Melanie is dead. She would like to blame it on psychology — a world without Jon alive is unthinkable to her, in a way it’s never been for anyone else — but she knows it isn’t, and she won’t run away from that certainty.)

The Institute's door is open, faintly ajar in the early morning breeze. At least the world ending so late at night means that there aren’t any corpses to trip over within the suffocating wood-panelled walls that lead her down to the Archives.

The thing that greets her at the bottom of the stairs is not Jon. Or, she corrects herself, studying him with numb curiosity, it is not  _ only _ Jon.

“Hello, Georgie,” he says calmly, though his hands are pressed to his eyes and he is rocking back and forth in the center of the corridor. “I shouldn’t be relieved to see you, I suppose.”

In many ways, he looks normal. Skin tinged the grey of sleepless nights, hair askew from running his hands through it too many times. There is a bloodstain on one of the cuffs of his shirt. Worrying, but— Georgie doesn’t worry about Jon. That’s the point.

Georgie reaches out to flick the lightswitch on, and she sees, more clearly, the intricate scarring that lines every inch of Jon’s skin. From a distance, the pattern is as meaningless as the low rumble of static in her ears. Then she steps closer, and realises that it’s writing, though not in any language that she can recognise. It shifts with every hitching rise and fall of Jon’s chest, like the information etched into his body is keeping him alive. She’s heard stranger.

“I forgive you,” she says, a lie.

“It’s the Extinction,” Jon continues, a response to a question she didn’t ask and wasn’t planning to. “Martin was— He tried to stop it. It didn’t— I think he caused it instead.”

“Everyone’s dead,” Georgie replies, since they seem to be saying obvious things.

“Yes.” The writing on Jon’s skin moves more violently, and Jon winces like it’s causing him pain. “But they’re all… preserved. For the moment.”

Georgie stares at him. He smiles, and even his teeth are etched with those ornate words.

“This is all, ah. Data storage. I’m— more of an Archive than an Archivist now.”

Jon stares back at her, and she has the unerring sense that he could archive her too — pull every fragment of her being into that collective of awful words that marks him. It seems to take physical effort for him to tear his gaze away. His breathing is heavy, and his skin glistens with sweat. When he glances back, muttering under his breath, he is more or less normal again.

“She loved you, you know.” Jon says it like it’s some great truth about the universe, like it will help Georgie make sense of the terrible things that have happened. The words on Jon’s skin shudder in unison with the earnest, purposeful blink of those all-consuming eyes.

“Fuck off,” Georgie replies, and she can’t tell if it’s a whisper or a scream.

“Martin didn’t love me, in the end,” Jon murmurs. He stares at his palms, watching the scarring writhe and pulse like a caress. “I wondered, but— too late. Always too late.”

“Fuck off,” Georgie repeats, as her shoulders sag in a kind of defeat.

She steps into the office that isn’t his, and places her clothes on one of the dustier desks. The cat carrier makes an unwholesome clunking sound as it hits the wood, and the Admiral meows in objection. She doesn’t let him out, not yet.

When she turns around, Jon is standing in the doorway. His arms are folded and his expression is stern. It’s only because she knows him that she notices the subtle things: the way his legs are shaking, the way he leans against the doorframe for support. He really does look like shit.

“The storage room has a few cots. We’ve got enough food in the breakroom to last us for a month’s siege, if—”  _ if either of us need to eat anymore, _ Georgie hears, though Jon knows better than to say it. “No cat food, but— there’s a Sainsbury’s a few minutes from here. I don’t think anyone is going to complain if you want to break in.”

He seems to be waiting for an answer, so Georgie nods, forcing her face into something that could charitably be called a grateful smile.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and leaves her in the silence of the empty office.

Why did she come here?

It’s a question that Georgie asks herself over and over, tossing and turning on an uncomfortable bed. She knows she couldn’t have stayed in that flat, taunting herself with the certainty of opening her own bedroom door to see what lay behind. She needed to leave, she doesn’t doubt that. But she doesn’t know why she came  _ here. _

She would have been quite happy to never see Jon in person again. She’s always known he’s alive from his presence in her sleeping world, and that, she tells herself, is all the knowledge she needs. Georgie was happy in her flat, with her girlfriend and her cat, keeping the sharp edges of the world far away from herself.

Perhaps she cares more than she thought.

Perhaps she thought he could tell her about the apocalypse, every terrible detail.

(Perhaps, says the icy certainty that woke her on that first night, she simply knew he wasn’t dead. With every hour, life’s warmth fades from her fingers a little more.)

When she sleeps on the second night, Jon does not haunt her dreams. She wanders concrete streets and weaving countryside paths, and there is no sign that life ever existed. No footprints in the mud, no graffiti on the walls, no plants springing from the ground. Just dead earth and her.

She wakes up exactly ninety minutes later. She tiptoes along the corridor, Admiral at her side, and goes to check on Jon. She knows he isn’t dead but— she wonders.

Jon, as it turns out. is curled up in the chair in his office. He looks very small against the black leather. His eyes flicker wildly below their lids; his hands twitch as though they’re grasping for something they cannot reach; he murmurs desperate pleas in a hundred languages all at once.

He isn’t Georgie’s responsibility, she reminds herself. All the same, she reaches out a hand and gently shakes him awake.

“Jon?” 

As his eyes flutter open, Jon makes a soft sound of realisation. He fixes her with his gaze.

“Can you imagine,” he begins slowly, like he’s forgotten how to shape the words, “dreaming the nightmares of everyone who has ever lived?”

“No,” Georgie says, and Jon laughs, wry and tired.

“No, I suppose not.”

His smile when the Admiral jumps for his lap is— honestly, kind of heartbreaking. He looks so openly happy, and yet his eyes glisten with tears. He makes meaningless cooing sounds, curling his fingers against the bottom of the Admiral’s face. When the Admiral begins to purr, he sobs, and leans his head back against his chair.

“It’s too much,” he says. “There’s too much—  _ in me. _ Humans aren’t built for this, and— I’m much more human than I ever thought before.”

“What…” Georgie hesitates; does she want to know? “What  _ are _ you?”

“The Archivist,” Jon says, exhausted. “I’m— The Extinction couldn’t be stopped, I see that now, but my— my  _ god _ used me as… call it a stop-gap measure. Nothing so benevolent as an outright solution, of course,” he adds, poisonous. “Every human who died is written into my skin, knowing nothing but their own suffering. And I watch and  _ experience _ alongside them, because I can’t do anything else.”

“That’s messed up,” Georgie comments, as mildly as she can.

Jon sighs in wordless agreement.

“I shouldn’t sleep. It’s worse when I sleep.” Georgie recognises a veiled request when she hears one, hidden behind Jon’s trademark mixture of pride and self-hatred. 

“Do you want me to stay?” Georgie asks, because maybe the apocalypse is a time for pity.

Jon’s eyes widen with a flare of panic, and then he smiles, nodding wearily.

“I— Yes. If you would. The Admiral too.”

“Well, where he goes, I go.”

“That sounds about right.”

The apocalypse shouldn’t be comfortable, but slowly, it is.

You can get used to anything, and she’s already half-used to the ups and downs of Jon’s company anyway. They eat crappy tinned food from the breakroom and treat the Admiral to some leftover fish. Somehow, the internet is still working, so they watch documentaries together on Jon’s laptop, pretending life is still normal outside these stone walls. Georgie records an episode of  _ What the Ghost _ that she’d been planning, releasing it to a nonexistent audience.

A few days after she arrives, Georgie pulls on a too-big coat she found in the storage room, leaves Jon entertaining the Admiral, and ventures out in search for that Sainsbury’s Jon mentioned. They need cat food, if nothing else, and she’s starting to get stir-crazy.

The streets aren’t any better than they were; the stench of burning has been overtaken by decay. All the insects that didn’t know to fear extinction hover over corpses, eating their fill. Georgie does her best to ignore the buzzing, walking along the empty roads until she stumbles on the promised shop. The lights are on inside and the doors slide open at her presence.

There’s decay here too — fresh fruit long past its sell-by date. Her nutrition is going to go downhill now that the world has ended, Georgie thinks wryly. She spends several minutes browsing the shelves and shovelling food into her basket, humming under her breath.

She turns the corner into the next aisle, and—

There’s a man standing there. He gives her a friendly, if slightly awkward, smile. He looks familiar — more than that, he  _ feels _ familiar. There’s a grey tinge to his dark skin, and he’s jarringly gaunt, like someone has drained all of the vitality from his form.

He’d looked handsome before, she remembers. Now he just looks like a corpse.

“I thought it might be rude to go to the Institute directly,” he says, “so I was hoping someone would show up here sooner or later. I mean, everyone has to eat.” The last sentence is said with something approaching wry humour, though there’s still something stilted to his tone.

“What do you want?” Georgie demands, beyond caring about being rude to eldritch horrors.

“I’m not really sure, if I’m honest.” The man — Antonio? — shrugs. “Spiders, you know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Huh.” He looks genuinely surprised at that, glassy eyes widening. “Fair enough.”

Georgie rolls her eyes, pushing past him to carry on down the aisle. She can hear him following at a leisurely, almost cheerful, pace.

“How is Jon?” Antonio asks after a while.

“What were you doing in the hospital?” Georgie counters, hoping this will put him off. Instead, she hears a contemplative hum, and a sigh.

“I wanted to talk to him. He had a choice to make and I—  _ she _ wanted to make sure he made it.”

“Really.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I got something out of it too. The dreams were getting a bit old, and— well, it’s not the kind of thing I  _ want _ to get jaded to.”

This makes Georgie turn around. She’d  _ assumed _ that other people had those same staring nightmares, but it’s another thing to hear someone talking about them so casually. Antonio has a pleasant expression on his face. In the space between blinks, Georgie sees something dark curling up his throat.

“What dreams?” Her wariness is fading, which is— stupid of her, maybe. But she’s so tired of being on the defensive. It wears even  _ her _ down eventually. “You get dreams?”

“Oh, yeah.” The smile he gives her is definitely wry this time, coloured with a resignation that reminds her bitterly of Jon at his unhappiest.

“And you don’t  _ hate him?” _

“Well, honestly, the dreams with him are kind of nostalgic. Peaceful. Then again, so are the rest of my dreams, more and more.”

Maybe this is part of being touched by— the End, or whatever. No fear, just an endless aching quiet. Georgie finds herself sighing, looking at him properly. He looks… tired. Exactly like she feels. Trying to keep going in the face of what their world has become.

“Okay, Antonio. You can come back to the Institute with me. Jon will probably be happy for more company.” It’ll be a distraction, at least. At this point, that’s all she can do for him.

Antonio’s eyes widen, like he genuinely didn’t expect that. Then he breaks out into a grin, and she can see the remnants of the handsome man he must have been before the End took him.

“Oh! Thank you!” He hesitates, expression turning faintly sheepish. “In the interests of goodwill, and all… It’s not Antonio, it’s Oliver. Not really sure  _ why _ I lied when we first met, honestly.”

Georgie raises a brow, but she can’t even find it in herself to be surprised.

“Fine. Grab a basket. Least you can do is help with the shopping.”

By the time they get back to the Archives, Georgie has, quite unwillingly, softened to Oliver. He reminds her of Jon, which probably means that even if he’s a supernatural horror of death, he isn’t an outright murderous one. She’ll take what she can get.

Jon doesn’t even look surprised when Georgie gets back. He looks up from the sleeping Admiral, staring at Oliver with a gaze that is utterly dispassionate. Assessing, but distant.

“It makes sense, I suppose,” Jon says at last, glancing at Georgie. “The End still has a foothold on a dying world. Whoever’s left must be scared of whatever death is coming to them.”

Oliver shrugs.

“The spiders are still about too,” he offers. “Not sure what that says. Maybe it’s just luck.”

Jon snorts, fidgeting with his lighter - on and off, on and off. There’s a strange quality to the light of the flame, and his skin looks unblemished beneath the glow. If he notices, he doesn’t consider it worth a reaction. One hand moves down to stroke the Admiral.

“It’s never luck, in my experience.”

“No,” Oliver agrees, leaning against a bookshelf. “I think you’re right about that. Might just be whichever of us died already got skipped over. Not exactly a blessing.”

“And now it’s picking us off one by one,” Jon murmurs to himself.

“Mm.” Oliver nods. “It’s funny, really.”

“Is it?” Georgie doesn’t realise she’s spoken until two identical gazes of resignation turn to her. “There’s got to be  _ something _ we can do. I don’t want to just sit around and— wait to die. I don’t want to  _ give up.” _

Oliver shrugs, pulling his tatty coat tighter around his gaunt form. Georgie sees another flash of something dark winding its way across his skin, almost possessive in its motions.

“I reckon I’ve a week left in me. If there’s anything  _ any _ of us can do, I won’t be much help.” 

“The Web must have sent you here for a reason.” Jon’s expression has gained a considering air. “Did you, ah,  _ see _ this before it happened?”

“I saw the death. Couldn’t do anything about it, of course—”

“But you  _ knew _ it would happen.” Jon sits up straighter, leaning across his desk to stare at Oliver with hungry eyes. “Tell me. Please.”

“Another statement?” There’s something unreadable, almost dangerous, in Oliver’s expression, then he smiles. “Well, if you think it’ll help.”

Jon doesn’t smile back, but he shows his teeth. A tape recorder clicks on and begins to whir.

**Author's Note:**

> :D
> 
> as always, you can find me at [screechfoxes](https://screechfoxes.tumblr.com) on tumblr! have a good day!


End file.
